Students from Rome’s LUISS Guido Carli University were visiting the Speaker of Parliament when Italy’s unemployment numbers came out yesterday. The data made dismal reading for a generation that increasingly looks abroad for work opportunities, just as Italians did in the old days.

The number of people out of work reached 2.87 million in October, the highest since quarterly reports began in 1992.

The figure marked a 0.3 per cent month-on-month increase in the unemployment rate to 11.1 per cent, the first time that the unemployment rate has exceeded 11 per cent since 1999 and an unexpected year-on-year increase of